Basketball Toto

What Basketball Toto is

Basketball Toto is the basketball arm of Sports Toto, South Korea's state-run sports pool betting service. Alongside soccer, baseball, volleyball and golf, basketball is one of the sports you can bet on through official channels, and Basketball Toto covers games from the Korean Professional Basketball League, the Korean Women's Basketball League, major games held at home and abroad, and the American NBA¹.

The format is pool betting rather than fixed odds. You pick an outcome, everyone else picks theirs, and the winners share a prize pool built from half of all ticket sales. That is different from Proto fixed-odds betting, where your payout is locked in when you buy. The two systems sit side by side under the Sports Toto umbrella, and you can read about the wider picture in our guide to sports betting in South Korea.

Within Basketball Toto there are five games, and they work quite differently from each other. Four of them, Match, Special, Special Plus and Special N, ask you to predict score bands, how many points the teams will combine for, while the fifth, Seung-5-Pae, is a classic win/margin pool across 14 matches. The unit price is KRW 100 for the score-band games and KRW 1,000 for the 14-match game¹.

The five games at a glance

Sports Toto sorts its pool games by difficulty: high-chance pools, mid-chance specials and low-chance match games, with Basketball Toto's products spread across those tiers⁴. The score-band games are "score-based" voting, meaning you mark a points range rather than a winner¹. Seung-5-Pae is a "special type" game, closer in spirit to the soccer version, Soccer Toto's Seung-mu-pae³.

Basketball Toto Match: predicting two score bands of one game

Match is the simplest Basketball Toto game. One game is chosen from Korean Professional Basketball League fixtures or a major game held domestically or abroad, and you predict two things about it: the first-half score band, meaning the combined points of both teams in the first and second quarters, and the final score band, overtime included¹.

The first-half bands are:

• 34 points or fewer
• 35 to 39
• 40 to 44
• 45 to 49
• 50 to 54
• 55 or more

The final-score bands are:

• 69 points or fewer
• 70 to 79
• 80 to 89
• 90 to 99
• 100 to 109
• 110 or more

To win first prize you must hit both bands on the same ticket. Each band has six options, and the official odds of first prize are 1 in 1,296¹. First prize takes 100% of the refund pool for the game type, so if you are the only winner in a round, the entire pool is yours, split with any other winners¹.

Multiple purchase is allowed, so you can cover several band combinations on one ticket rather than being stuck with a single guess¹. The game counts everything from the opening tip to the final buzzer, so a game that goes to extra time still uses its full final score¹.

Final score bands across two or three games: Special and Special Plus

Special takes the score-band idea and spreads it across more games. Two or three games are selected from Korean Professional Basketball League fixtures and major games at home and abroad, and you predict the final score band of each, using the same six bands and the same overtime-inclusive scoring as Match⁵.

There are two game types. Double asks you to predict games 1 and 2, and Triple asks you to predict all three. First prize in either type requires every selected game's final score band to be correct, and the pool share works as in Match⁵. Double has the same 1 in 1,296 odds as Match; Triple is 1 in 46,656⁵. Multiple purchase works the same way as in Match⁵.

Special Plus is structurally identical: same two or three games, same six bands, same Double and Triple types, same odds and pool rules⁶. The difference is what the money is for. Special Plus is an increased-allocation product whose proceeds fund the running of large-scale international sports competitions, and it is issued separately from the regular Special product even though the game method is the same⁶. In practice you treat it the same way when you play; it simply appears as its own round with its own prize pools.

Basketball Toto Special N: NBA games and their own score bands

Special N is the NBA version. Instead of Korean league games, it targets two or three NBA games, and you predict the final score band of each⁷. Because NBA games are much higher scoring than Korean league games, the bands are different:

• 89 points or fewer
• 90 to 99
• 100 to 109
• 110 to 119
• 120 to 129
• 130 or more

The structure otherwise mirrors Special: Double covers games 1 and 2, Triple covers all three, and everything else, the odds, the pool share and multiple purchase, works as described above⁷.

If you follow the NBA rather than the Korean league, this is the Basketball Toto product aimed at you, and it runs on the same sales calendar and payout rules as the others.

Seung-5-Pae: win/5/loss across 14 matches

Seung-5-Pae (승5패, literally win/5/loss) is the big-pool game and the closest thing Basketball Toto has to a traditional football pools coupon. Fourteen matches are selected from Korean Professional Basketball League games, Korean Women's Basketball League games and NBA games, and for each one you predict the home team's final result, overtime included, as one of three outcomes³:

• Win: the home team wins by 6 points or more
• 5: the game is decided by 5 points or fewer, either way
• Loss: the home team loses by 6 points or more

The unit bet is KRW 1,000, higher than the score-band games, and multiple purchase is allowed³. Prizes are split across four ranks, each taking a fixed share of the refund pool³:

The odds of winning any prize at all are 1 in 1,447³. The three-outcome, 14-match structure is the same one used by Soccer Toto's Seung-mu-pae, so if you have played that game, Seung-5-Pae will feel familiar.

Odds, prize pools and the 50% refund rate

Every Basketball Toto product runs on a fixed refund rate: 50% of total sales is returned as prizes¹. This is the same rate that applies across Sports Toto's fixed-refund pool products generally⁸, and it is comparable to the roughly 50% payout level of tax-free lottery tickets in the region⁹. The other half goes to sports promotion funds, which is the civic purpose behind the whole system.

What that means in practice: if a round takes in KRW 100 million in ticket sales, KRW 50 million becomes the prize pool. In the score-band games, first prize takes the whole pool for the game type you played, shared among all winners. In Seung-5-Pae, the pool is split 50/20/10/20 across the four ranks.

Because prizes are pooled rather than fixed, your payout depends on how many other people picked the same bands or results as you. A popular pick that wins pays less per ticket than an unpopular one. There is no published odds board the way there is with fixed-odds betting; you know the pool structure, but not your exact payout, until the results are in.

Winnings are rounded up to the nearest won unit, and any winning amount smaller than the unit bet is paid at the unit bet amount, so a KRW 100 ticket that technically earns KRW 40 still pays KRW 100¹.

Betting windows, results and how winnings are paid

Sales for every Basketball Toto product open one to three days before the deadline and close at the scheduled start time of the first target game¹. For Match, that means the window shuts when the single target game tips off; for the specials and Seung-5-Pae, it shuts when the first of the covered games begins. Once sales close, no more tickets are sold for that round.

Results are announced the same day the final game ends, across all five games¹. So for a typical round you buy midweek, the games play out over a day or two, and you know your result that evening.

If you buy tickets through Betman, the online platform, winnings are paid either to your deposit account or to a registered refund bankbook, your choice. Refunds, for example when a round is voided, go automatically back to your deposit, and you withdraw from there to your own bank account. Anything bought with Betmoney is refunded as Betmoney¹. If you buy a paper ticket at a Sports Toto outlet, you claim at the outlet, presenting the ticket.

Rollovers, voided games and canceled tickets

If nobody wins a round, the prize pool does not vanish. In the score-band games, if there are no winners for a game type, the pool rolls over to the next round for that same game type, so a Double pool carries into the next round's Double and a Triple into the next Triple⁵. In Match, a round with no winners rolls into the next round¹.

Seung-5-Pae has the most elaborate carryover rules, in force since August 8, 2025. Only the 1st place prize carries over, for up to five consecutive rounds. After more than five consecutive carryovers, the money is distributed to the next lower rank that has winners in that round, or if nobody won at all, the whole carryover goes to the next round's 1st to 4th prizes at a 5:2:1:2 ratio. Second and third place pools never carry over; they drop to the next lower rank in the same round. If there is no 4th place winner, that money is distributed to the next round's 2nd, 3rd and 4th prizes at a 2:1:2 ratio³.

Canceled games are handled per product. In Match, if the target game is canceled, the sale is voided and refunded¹. In the specials, if a target game is not held, only the affected game type in that round is voided: if game 3 is canceled, the Triple is voided and refunded while the Double is processed normally⁵. In Seung-5-Pae, if two matches or fewer are canceled, those matches are deemed correctly predicted for everyone; if three or more are canceled, the whole sale is voided and refunded³.

One more edge case worth knowing: if a match schedule changes, the ticket stays valid if the new date falls within the last target game date of the issuing round, Korea time, and becomes void if the game moves to the next day or later. And across all Toto products, a game declared suspended is treated as void¹⁰.

As for your own tickets: once a ticket is properly issued, it cannot be canceled, refunded or modified. That rule is stated identically on every Basketball Toto product page, so check your slip before you leave the counter¹.

Tax on winnings and claim deadlines

The tax rules are the same across all Basketball Toto products. No tax is charged if your winning odds are 100x or lower and the refund is KRW 2,000,000 or less, or, regardless of odds, if the refund is KRW 100,000 or less¹. In practice, most Basketball Toto payouts fall under these thresholds, so most winners take home the full amount. Larger wins, typically big Seung-5-Pae first prizes after rollovers, are taxed. You can read the wider rules in our page on tax on gambling winnings in South Korea.

Claim deadlines are generous and uniform: you have one year from the day after the official results announcement to claim, though payment can actually start on announcement day itself. If the deadline falls on a non-banking day, the next banking day becomes the deadline¹. A year is a long window, but unclaimed prizes are simply lost, so do not leave a winning slip in a drawer.

Who can play

Basketball Toto is open to anyone in South Korea who is 19 or older, whether citizen, foreign resident or visitor, and tickets are sold at Sports Toto outlets across the country and through the Betman platform. The practical catch for visitors is that Betman and the outlet network are built around Korean payment methods and Korean-language interfaces, so buying a ticket as a short-term visitor usually means finding a physical outlet and paying cash. Foreign residents with a Korean bank account and an ARC will find the process straightforward.

The one thing nobody, local or foreign, can do is buy Basketball Toto from an overseas site or an unlicensed online operator. The products described on this page are the legal route; anything else falls under the rules covered in our guide to gambling laws in South Korea, and the practical risk is that offshore sites are blocked and unregulated. For the full picture of what is available to visitors, see gambling in South Korea as a visitor.